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This CHURCH Employee Thought a Blackface Boxing Match Was a Good Idea….

I typically don’t post little blurbs that I see streaming down my Facebook feed, but couldn’t resist when I saw Kissing Fish post this link to a Huffington Post article in which a CHURCH employee thought it was a good idea to hold a blackface boxing match.

During the 2014 National Young Fundamentalist Conference, the fine people at Clay Mills Road Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky thought it would be totally awesome to put on a blackface boxing match because, you know, it wouldn’t be ignorant nor racist at all.

Many spoke out after Joseph G. Pickens, Fugate’s assistant, tweeted a picture of himself in blackface wearing boxing gloves with the caption, “#NYFC 2014 fool! It’s about to go down! Who thinks they can #contend with the champ???”

A Daily Mail reporter asked Fugate why a “white man wearing blackface in the South” did not raise any red flags, and he claimed that he wasn’t aware of the skit’s content before it was performed. ‘I am so sorry that I have offended anyone by doing something that would be ignorant,’ Fugate, pastor of 23 years, said. ‘It was innocent, I promise you.’

Okay, I’m not sure how big of a congregation Clay Mills Road Baptist Church is, but unless it is a mega church, chances are the pastor knew about this horrendous idea.

Next, how in the world is a white and southern assistant, nonetheless, donning blackface innocently in 2014!?!?!?!?!

The justification for such an awful idea continues from Pastor Fugate:

Fugate highlighted Pickens’ inexperience as a way of explaining the performance, revealing that he was a recent Bible college graduate and “not even a pastor.”

“I don’t know what to say, I didn’t mean to offend anyone… I never had any thought of it until I got a couple of twitter messages,” he continued.

Fugate told The Daily Mail that a significant portion of his congregation is black, and that he has “absolutely zero racism in [his] heart towards black people.”

That’s right, the Pastor just used the old, “I can’t be racist, I have black friends” line.

Honestly, there shouldn’t be one INTELLIGENT person on this green earth trying to excuse this asinine behavior with even more awful asinine logic.

Furthermore, Pastor states that his assistant was not a pastor and was a recent college graduate. Okay, then how could he NOT know about the offensive nature of this!?!

Of course, proponents of Christian Fundamentalism are yelling, “He’s in costume for Clubber Lang. It’s a real person. It’s not racism.”

1. The assistant was white donning blackface, no?

2.) By admission, there are black attendants of the church that could have been utilized for this role, no?

3.) Don’t be an ignoramus and suggest this isn’t offensive because it is.

Blackface has specific connotations in the United States. It is not just the makeup aspect, but rather how it was used as a form of oppression. Disagreeing with those that are offended doesn’t change the history or the connotations that go with it.

It’s that simple.

Get a clue, Clay Mills. You may not be racist, but the your overall ineptitude is very, very apparent.